From the Very Beginning ....to the Troubled Times to come Before the Deluge...

l

Friday, 7 November 2014

Occupy Democracy

Occupy Democracy is not considered newsworthy. It should be

David Graeber…the Guardian

Sleeping outside for an iPhone is OK, but do it in
furtherance of democratic expression and you’re in trouble

You can tell a lot about the moral quality of a society by
what is, and is not, considered news.

From last Tuesday, Parliament Square was wrapped in wire
mesh. In one of the more surreal scenes in recent British political history,
officers with trained German shepherds stand sentinel each day, at calculated
distances across the lawn, surrounded by a giant box of fences, three metres
high – all to ensure that no citizen enters to illegally practice democracy.
Yet few major news outlets feel this is much of a story.

Occupy Democracy, a new incarnation of Occupy London, has
attempted to use the space for an experiment in democratic organising. The idea
was to turn Parliament Square back to the purposes to which it was, by most
accounts, originally created: a place for public meetings and discussions, with
an eye to bringing all the issues ignored by politicians in Westminster back
into public debate. Seminars and assemblies were planned, colourful bamboo
towers and sound systems put in place, to be followed by a temporary library,
kitchen and toilets.

There was no plan to turn this into a permanent tent city,
which are now explicitly illegal. True, this law is very selectively enforced;
Metropolitan police regularly react with a wink and a smile if citizens camp on
the street while queuing overnight for the latest iPhone. But to do it in
furtherance of democratic expression is absolutely forbidden. Try it, and you
can expect to immediately see your tent torn down and if you try even the most
passive resistance you’re likely to be arrested. So organisers settled on a symbolic
24-hour presence, even if it meant sleeping on the grass under cardboard boxes
in the autumn rain.

The police response can only be described as hysterical.
Tarpaulins used to sit on the grass were said to be illegal, and when activists
tried to sit on them they were attacked by scores of officers. Activists say
they had limbs twisted and officers stuck thumbs into nerve endings as “pain
compliance”. Pizza boxes were declared illegal structures and confiscated and
commanders even sent officers to stand over activists at night telling them it
was illegal to close their eyes.

Finally, the fences went up, and the guard dogs appeared –
ostensibly, for what officers insisted was scheduled cleaning that happened to
continue each day of the occupation. Hundreds of participants were thus pushed
into the tiny green strip to the north of the Churchill statue, and even then,
it seemed like every time they sat down for a seminar on financial reform or
planning a response to the housing crisis, they were interrupted by some new
pretext for police intervention – someone had an “illegal” megaphone, there was
what looked like camping equipment, some regulation might have been violated –
and squads of police once again stormed in.

One could speak of many things here: the obvious
embarrassment of the police, compared with the perseverance and cheerful good
humour of the occupiers, who continually grew in numbers and spirit as the
repression increased. But what I really want to talk about is the reaction of
the media.

The reason that park occupations are so important is because
everyone knows they are there. Activists constantly hear the same refrain from
would-be allies: “I agree that there’s been an erosion of democracy in this
country, that the money controls everything, what I don’t know is: what can I
do?” Our usual reply is: meet with other like-minded people. When people get
together, brilliant ideas invariably emerge. But it’s impossible to bring
people together unless there is a location, a place where they can always go,
24/7, to meet people and begin to have conversations and make plans. This is
precisely what our political authorities have decided that Londoners must never
again be allowed to have.

To achieve this, the police and media must take what are
ostensibly completely opposite reactions to any occupation. The police act as
if the possibility of non-violent camping is an existential threat to the very
idea of civil government; hundreds of police are mobilised in a near-panic
reaction; hallowed public spaces are shut off.

Official media, on the other hand – and in this case the BBC
and mainstream newspapers are acting as if they were an arm of government –
take exactly the opposite approach, insisting that the events in question are
so trivial and unimportant that there is no need to cover them at all. The very
same press that provides wall-to-wall coverage of pro-democracy occupations and
police repression halfway around the world, in Hong Kong, acts as if analogous
events at home are of no interest. It’s hard to think of a more dramatic story
than battles between police and non-violent protesters, or the erection of
giant fences and mobilisation of attack dogs directly beneath the mother of all
parliaments. Yet while I was in the square, the only TV cameras I saw were
being carried by journalists from Iran, Russia and Qatar.

We need to ask ourselves what it means that police
suppression of democratic assemblies is no longer considered news. Is the wall
of silence, as most activists suspect, simply a continuation of the actual
physical wall surrounding Parliament Square, another piece of the same
strategy, or is it a token of ultimate cynicism? Britons no longer have the
right to freedom of assembly. Sorry, that’s no longer news.

about me

A new counter-culture is now spreading across the planet, a movement dedicated to protesting at the outlandish behaviour of the control freaks, with their surveillance, eavesdropping, secrecy and lies. Their greed and belligerent sabre rattling and their industries of war. The dream is to replace these sociopaths with Love!

I wish this blog to be a small part of this - We must be the change.

We will be set to task to rebuild our world and our planet from centuries of decimation and destruction brought on by the fallacy, the belief that we once tragically and collectively embraced thousands of years ago – the mistaken notion that we are separate from one another and everything else on the planet and in the universe. We will finally recognize that the truth is just the opposite – we are all one with everything on the planet and in the universe. We are spiritual beings, infinite consciousness simply having a human experience, and as soon we come to fully recognize and understand this, it will then finally be time for us to fly – to shine in all of our infinite, glorious possibility...